Many font generating systems exist for generating a family of Asian font characters or an Asian font. An Asian font is composed of a large number of characters or character patterns. The following are various character pattern generating techniques.
One method of generating character patterns is a stroke-based technique that uses character pattern data. This character pattern data includes skeleton pattern data, stroke thickness data and shape parameter data, see U.S. Pat. No. 4,897,638. Another stroke-based technique defines characters with strokes defined by height, width and curvature points, see U.S. Pat. No. 4,990,903. These stroke-based techniques are good for generating high-level descriptions of characters but are incompatible with numerous types of low-level resolution devices and printing devices and are generally slow.
Another technique uses font outlines. This type of system is described in "PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook" by Adobe Systems, Inc. (Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1985). According to this technique, the outline of a character pattern is stored in the form of straight lines and curves, and a conversion such as enlargement, reduction, rotation or the like is carried out at the time of outputting of a character pattern. The outline of a character pattern is defined by pre-stored, fabricated outline data (Bezier curves). In addition, it is possible to store an original character pattern in the form of an outline with high quality. However, this method is ineffective for generating a database of character data displayable on high and low resolution devices. Also, Asian characters described in outline form occupy large amounts of memory space because of the tens of thousands of different types of characters. The processing of Asian characters described by this technique becomes extensive because overlap removal must be performed for all overlapping strokes within a character.
The present invention is directed to overcoming the foregoing and other disadvantages, such as Chinese character recognition. More specifically, the present invention is directed to providing a method, apparatus and computer-readable medium for generating stroke-based glyph outline fonts regardless of display resolution level.